Letters to the Editor

The news titled “Border Patrol to the Rescue” (Neighborhood News, December 6) is almost certainly misleading. When crossing the border by car you will be inspected by a U.S. Customs Agent. Very rarely will you find a Border Patrol Agent working near the vehicle lanes. Most likely the woman seeking help was attended to by a Customs Agent. So, to clarify, Customs works the vehicle lanes, Immigration Inspectors work the pedestrian crossing, and Border Patrol works the areas where people try to enter without being inspected. Like the mountains, desert and sea. Border Patrol Agents wear green uniforms. Customs wear blue and Immigration wear white. I am writing this to inform that not every officer working the border is a Border Patrol Agent.

Blake Finlayvia email

All Wet

I read with interest your article “Bay Dreams” (November 29 cover story). Your last interviewee, Rob Quigley ... for all his big ideas, his head’s a little in the clouds. He says there’s no place you can actually stick your toe in the water, or literally touch it. Well, there are launch ramps, if you’ve ever launched a canoe or a kayak, where you can get your feet wet. Has he ever looked at Spanish [Landing]? There’s a beach there where children are cavorting in the water all the time. Same thing goes for Shelter Island. He should open his eyes.

I would like to say that I agree with Rob Quigley’s idea to “continue the city grid, 200-by-300-foot blocks and wipe out Seaport Village, which is an aberration,” and continue the grid like it used to be years ago — let the city touch the water. I agree totally with that. However, he mentions creating a bay within a bay by digging out landfill and letting the water back into the original shoreline. I agree with that, but I would continue it up to and including the airport, which is also on tidal land. It used to be Port Authority land and now it’s Airport Authority land.

Without copying another city, I think that Venice, California and the adjacent Marina del Rey would be a very good example for us to...not copy, but at least emulate in some way and make a San Diego version of it, having little canals cut into the land, kind of like where NTC has that Liberty Station housing. When you pass the airport on the right, there’s a canal that goes in and there are boats in there.

They could do dozens of canals on the airport property and tarmac, and have waterfront housing and office and retail, and increase the value of that property into the billions of dollars. Of course, that would entail moving the airport to Miramar, which I realize was voted down recently, about four or five years ago. I was on the panel for that — but it was very poorly done, kind of an online panel. And the whole promotion of the new airport was a disaster.

The airport has to be moved, canals have to be dug, and you could double the size of the waterfront — at least the San Diego portion of it — and have mixed use. No more noisy planes, and you could start going up in height. Because right now you cannot add height anywhere in the flight path. Also, the value of property in Point Loma would skyrocket, not to mention Mission Hills, to not have noisy planes landing and taking off.

I’ve been thinking about this for quite some time. I’ve talked to all kinds of people about it, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen a pretty well-done article. I also agree the football stadium should never be built downtown and the convention center should never be added onto downtown. This wall of convention/touristy kind of uses are blocking off the whole waterfront and view from the people. These so-called signature buildings have actually been a disaster for San Diego, and the quicker their expansion is stopped, the better.

One of the joys of having a job as a predictor and recommender is that one seldom, if ever, needs to make a decision, nor ever be held accountable for making lousy predictions and/or recommendations. Experts are just OK at understanding and explaining what’s going on (across myriad fields), and just plain bad at predicting. Look at the just-completed presidential election. How many pundits and pollsters predicted Obama would win by 100 electoral college votes? If one believes, as I do, that predicting is terribly difficult and, thus, too often a terribly inaccurate cult, then to act on these predictions in a major way is foolhardy. It is a real dilemma! Foolhardy to act, and foolhardy not to act.

Paul Jestervia email

About Yoshimi

Jeff Smith’s review of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (“In Sickness and in Health,” November 29) is informative and checks all the boxes — provenance of the creators, cursory plot summary, accolades to technical wizardry, and the accomplishments and merits of the various actors — before it degenerates into snarky speculation. Clearly he doesn’t see the mosaic for the tiles.

Yoshimi isn’t about anime, or music, or robots, or flash, or the lyrics of a song. It’s a figurative story about the heroic efforts of a young Yoshimi afflicted with lymphoma who struggles mightily to survive. It’s about her journey from onset, the confusion of diagnosis, through treatment to remission and then recurrence, and how she goes down fighting. It’s about the people in her life and how they stand by her or not. It is a story, happy and sad, that many of us have either experienced firsthand or through someone we know.

Maybe Mr. Smith was busy making notes or maybe he is just emotionally obtuse, but most of the people next to me in the theater were moved to tears at the conclusion. The people I knew who saw the show spent the next day walking around lost in reflection of the loved ones they lost to cancer. This is theater that will affect your life.